The article title is click bait here is the full article:
Wondering what your career looks like in our increasingly uncertain, AI-powered future? According to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, it’s going to involve less of the comfortable office work to which most people aspire, a more old fashioned grunt work with your hands.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum yesterday, Karp insisted that the future of work is vocational — not just for those already in manufacturing and the skilled trades, but for the majority of humanity.
In the age of AI, Karp told attendees at a forum, a strong formal education in any of the humanities will soon spell certain doom.
“You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy; hopefully you have some other skill,” he warned, adding that AI “will destroy humanities jobs.”
Karp, who himself holds humanities degrees from the elite liberal arts institutions of Haverford College and Stanford Law, will presumably be alright. With a net worth of $15.5 billion — well within the top 0.1 percent of global wealth owners — the Palantir CEO has enough money and power to live like a feudal lord (and that’s before AI even takes over.)
The rest of us, he indicates, will be stuck on the assembly line, building whatever the tech companies require.
“If you’re a vocational technician, or like, we’re building batteries for a battery company… now you’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable,” Karp insisted. “I mean, y’know, not to divert to my usual political screeds, but there will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with vocational work or manufacturing. The global economy runs on these jobs. But in a theoretical world so fundamentally transformed by AI that intellectual labor essentially ceases to exist, it’s telling that tech billionaires like Karp see the rest of humanity as their worker bees.
It seems that the AI revolution never seems to threaten those who stand to profit the most from it — just the 99.9 percent of us building their batteries.
I disagree with this, and we already have live examples today that are good analogs. Youtube is being flooded with AI generated slop. AI generated scripts, read by AI generated voices, over top of AI generated images.
I never seek these out, and actively avoid them when I can tell what they are before clicking on them. In that first 2 seconds of AI generated voice, I can tell this is slop and stop watching it seeking a human generated video instead.
It can’t. At some point the quality of the product drops to a level it is no longer a product. Lets say we’re in your theoretical dystopian future where the monopoly exists for cookies. There is no other place to buy cookies except from the monopoly. You posit that quality can drop indefinitely as there is zero alternative sources for cookies. So lets say the monopoly cookie brand was deciding to substitute some of the wheat flower with sawdust as a cost saving measure with the consequence being yet lower quality cookies. At a tiny fraction of sawdust you may notice it, but the sawdust cookie may still be better than no cookie. The monopoly continues to increase the sawdust content until the cookie contains zero wheat flour and is entirely substituted with sawdust. I believe even you would concede you would no longer buy the sawdust cookies at this point. Further, you would have stopped buying them earlier when the sawdust content became so high that the cookie was inedible to you even though it contained some wheat flour at that point.
This same thing will apply to Youtube. If the only thing left to watch on youtube is AI slop because no human creators exist, then there is no point in watching youtube anymore.
The point here, is that even with a monopoly on a product, as soon as the quality drops below a certain threshold (and this point is different for every consumer), the product stops being a product to them.
Report that crap, every time. I’s a plague.
And yet youtube is still the dominant video host.
You’re missing the point entirely. If instead of luxuries you look through the lens of necessities perhaps you’ll see.
Like replace cookies with bread and try tell me people will choose to starve first. Like obviously not.
You’re just too priveledged to realize what I’m describing has been going on in developing countries for decades.
Ask a ford employee 30 years ago about robot automation. Like this is not a new thing in the 2020s. The rich have a playbook for this.
Youtube hasn’t descended to being unusable yet.
I think you’re missing the point. If we substitute bread in the example I gave and they’re putting sawdust in it, then yes people will not buy bread made with zero flour, but instead made with sawdust. Yes, people will stop buying bread in that situation because they would die anyway because the bread doesn’t produce nutritional value.
Now you’re speaking against your original point. Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle. If anything it has increased it. A robot can have assembly tolerances much tighter than a human. Where is the lowering of quality from a robot making the vehicle that your original thesis demands?
I never said that and the quality of a ford truck is irrelevant to the assembly worker who lost their job due to automation.
You need to back up because you have gone down a tangent alone.
The notion that people won’t eat sawdust bread is demonstrably false with many historical examples proving you wrong. Your stipulation about zero flour is a moving goalpost and a strawman fyi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_food
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dmnvp5/before_the_french_revolution_bread_was_sometimes/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad
I agree we’re down a tangent, but I’m following the logic of your responses. This is a response to your original thesis: “AI robots can be utter shit”. Then you introduced the ford example for automation, which isn’t shit for assembly.
Which point to you want to back up to that would change our conversation path?
I’m glad you saw those. I specifically chose sawdust in my example because of those events in history. Those support what I’m talking about. When the adulteration of the food became bad enough, people stopped eating it.
My “zero flour” comment is a response to your original thesis where you said: “quality of service can drop indefinitely.”
It can’t be indefinitely. There’s a point where people will stop consuming it when it gets bad enough.
What I actually said was…
So yes you have completely missed my point and are arguing with yourself, not me.
Yes but I’m not talking about that. You need to go back and reread what I actually said and stop putting words in my mouth and trying to have a discussion with me that doesn’t exist.
I have never intentionally put words in your mouth. The best I can figure after rereading our entire thread is that you’re jumping around on different points but giving no clues in the conversation you’re doing that. As in, I’m responding to one of your points, but you’re providing a rebuttal for a completely different point of your own.
In this conversation I’ve been trying to restate what I’m seeing as your interpretation in an attempt to confirm we’re communicating, but then I get another response indicating we’re not communicating.
There’s two possibilities I see as to whats happening here:
OR
For the purposes of civility, I’m not going to make a judgment one which one these it is. I’ll let you give your downvote button a rest and simply bow out talking more with you today. Maybe in the future we’ll have better luck with one another.
Bro all I’m saying is that the trend of enshittification is only going to accelerate in the world of AI.
and youre like YOUTUBE IS SHIT NOWWWWWWWWWW
FORD TRUCKS GOOOOOD
You literally refuted a statement about market monopolies with your personal youtube habits!
Seriously. Like im not trying to be a dick but throw me a fuckin bone here.
Its the second one. I’m downvoting you because you keep omitting half my statements and responding to the resulting altered meaning… in a LOT more words than necessary I might add. Makes it really hard to redirect anything back on track when I have to dispel multiple misconceptions for every new statement. Feels like Sea Lioning which I’m gonna assume you don’t approve of.
From what I read you seem more concerned about the quality of youtube videos and ford trucks than the workers who lost their jobs due to automation. I’m not sayings thats what you believe mind you. Just pointing out how different of a page you are on than me.